Sunday, November 25, 2012

Max Keiser Wants To Kick The Poor While They're Down

Minimum wage laws are the inverse of Fed policy. Each new Fed easing move should, by law, accompany a rise in minimum wage.
— Max Keiser (@maxkeiser) November 25, 2012

The poor and low-skilled in America just can't catch a break. The elites, and their opinion-molding toadies, are determined to keep pounding them into the ground.

First, you have the Federal Reserve.

This institution is extremely detached from the reality of the average American. They're under the impression that they can forever debase the value of the dollar. And if Americans start to bark at higher prices, just tell them it's an illusion. Prices are only going up by 2%.

No worries.

After all, John Maynard Keynes assured them that the dupes would never put 2 and 2 together:

"The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

Americans may not know the cause, but despite the 2% mantra, they can see with their own eyes the higher bills that keep hitting their mailboxes, and the higher prices that greet them at the supermarkets.

Evidently, that's not enough for Max Keiser.

The poor & low-skilled should not only have their money debased, it should also be harder (or even impossible) for them to get a job!

The minimum wage outlaws jobs.

If the minimum wage is $10 per hr., then anyone whose productivity is worth less to an employer is in deep trouble.

But what if a prospective employee is ready and willing to work for $8 per hr....or $7...6...5? What if they just want a job? !!

Tough luck...The government forbids it, and has better plans for them. Head on over to the unemployment office.

Rising prices, coupled with a rising minimum wage, is a perfect one-two punch to the poor and low-skilled.

Max Keiser gives the idea a thumbs up.

UPDATE: Robert Wenzel's response to Max Keiser's comment about this post is here.

I'm confused. If minimizing government subsidies is the goal, why not eliminate minimum wage laws?

If a man needs $10/hr (minimum wage) to get by, but his skills are fairly valued at $9/hr, then, with minimum wage laws in effect, won't the government need to subsidize him to the tune of $10/hr, as opposed to $1/hr?

Businesses can't sustainably pay workers more than they produce. I also disagree with the idea that a person can't live off of $5/hr. It's probably a pretty shitty life and a life I don't want to live, but I don't think you slowly die from starvation if you're making $5/hr.

Maybe society shouldn't be creating products and services that require the people who work to make them to starve? Seems like the capital would be better used to produce things people can actually support themselves producing.

In your ideal system, the person who will submit to living the worst life will be employed an everyone else can die. Nice.

I would like to see true ownership of work, the problem is that most of YOU are ALL owned as stock/human resource. Now if you don't see that the way the system is made in order to keep ALL of you permanentally under a financial floor, whether using financial warfare, or limitless U.S. (Inc.) that which you would like to call "gov interference" (there is no gov, bu the way you suckers), then there will never be a solution. It is all top-down structures that work the way a cancer does. you are food. they created all of the "you are my slave and I owe you" ideologies take your pick left, right, libertarian, socialist, fascist whatever else. So all arguing about republicans and lefties are already in their trap, and you will never figure out the solution when the workers will be completely usurped while the owners will be swimming in the wealth that they slowly laundered using ALL of YOU. get out of the left right paradigm and start thinking with variables of higher than 5 dimensions/degrees/magnitudes otherwise you will be suckered into another ideology. All of this is rigged and you have class system, meaning that those in power will do anything to stay there. You don't have real competition only ologopolies/duapolies. if employers would start paying exactly what the workers are worth with an 8% profit to themselves, then we wouldn't have a discussion of minimum wage, it would not be necessary. If banks payed taxes and the FED would input the interest to be payed into circulation or abolish interest then we would see all of their criminally gained profits go down to their realistic levels. how can banks charge interest on credit that they produced out of thin air? what value does the digital creation of credit in milliseconds have? how much energy does it take to push a few electrons? and you are paying how much in interest payments? how much energy did it take to acquire that interest payment? do you see the absurd inconsistency in the energy needed to pay and the energy needed to create credit??? I would like to see banks run AT COST, the whole credit crunch BS would evaporate. you do not have a fair market, that is what the problem is, you have a bunch of privileged outdated thugs maintaining their i'relevance. Trying to have others do the work for them and receive something for free without putting the energy in manifesting. Another simple concept that Ford got right "we have to pay them high wages, why? because if I don't who is going to buy my products?" stupid stupid stupid, you are all hoodwinked. do you think that we would be in this situation if people got payed higher wages? retarded race to the bottom, wallmart cancer mentality, do you understand that we would still have our manufacturing base and all of the JOBS that are practically all gone and lots of $$$ to go around, the waste, loss and need for welfare would be gone. the more $$$ circulate as a current, the higher value the $$$ have, but if you have all of these centralized centers sucking it all out of the current into capacitance state (you call this CAPital, the financial economy is like a circuit if you haven't noticed yet, dollars are a symbolic units of energy, all currents induce work as a result, yes the FED is a Matrix power-station that regulates YOUR energy and how fast it travels in a current) But ALL of THIS is not about common sense it is ALL about power and keeping YOU as an expendable resource. These psychopaths will take the whole world out with nuukes before they will allow REAL competition to emerge. Maybe the ruling class does not trust you serfs yet to give you the true knowledge of how the system REALLY works

So Anonymous@4:35, it is exaggerative to say that people are starving to death. If a person earning $5/hr can buy peanut butter and bread for only an hour's work, he can do other stuff with his money, such as buy water and clothing. He can find shelter by sleeping out in the street or woods by buying a tent.

So no one is literally starving to death. Again, it's a shitty life, but it's exaggerative and completely false to say people are starving.

this is pure rush limbuagh faux news propaganda in favor of the greedy 1%

you hate working class people, thats obvious. we the people want better pay and working conditions, worker pay is stagnant while ceo pay is 500% increase, we the people voted for change, you rethuglicans lost.

Obama is on the side of the people and unions, every person has the right to a living wage. the minimum wage should be raised to atleast 20$ hour and ceo pay and corporate profits should be capped and taxed at the 90% like it used to be when america was growing at record levels.

CEO Council Demands Cuts To Poor, Elderly While Reaping Billions In Government Contracts, Tax Breaks

To understand the importance of banking profits to the members of the deficit council, one need look no further than the two top-ranking members of the Campaign To Fix The Debt's steering committee, former New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg (R) and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat. Gregg is currently employed as an international adviser to Goldman Sachs, while Rendell collects his paycheck from the boutique investment bank Greenhill & Co.

This is a complete non sequitur. This post, and the author, have never once stated any support for Republicans, typically this website is opposed to Republicans. Secondly neither have anything to do with Rush Limbaugh. I doubt that many people that enjoy this website would even know where Limbaugh stands on the issue since I doubt that many ever listen to him.

You managed to make two errors in eight words, but of course never attempted to debate the core of the message, which is that minimum wage laws keep people at the lower end of the social strata out of work.

Libertarian and conservative internet forums are exemplars of critical thinking and are in no way an echo-chamber of people applying the knee-jerk solution of "the market" for every single social problem ever.

You are obviously right on this point. I don't understand how Max Keiser can honestly claim raising the minimum wage would actually help anything. It would certainly put pressure on small businesses that are already squeezed. It might cause some people to make more money and others to lose a job. That's what government manipulation of the economy produces, inefficiencies and distortions in social structure.

Leftist tools on this board can't think outside the left/right paradigm. Not to say right wingers are much better, but in my experience they are more receptive the liberty and aren't as good at goosestepping as the left.

Max keiser is not libertarian or for free markets. He believes in heavy regulation and blames banks for all ills of society. While he may be 99% correct whenever he rants about the banks, he leaves governments blameless. Max Keiser hasn't connected all the dots yet. I stopped paying attention to him about a year ago.

The government is the only body capable of making laws. Banks do not make the laws or enforce them. If the government is doing something on behalf of the banks, the blame lies on the government because they are the only entity with governing power. It shouldn't be a surprise that people and businesses lobby the government to help themselves out. The problem is the government not following the Constitution.

You guys are harsh. While its difficult defending Kaisers mannerisms and buffoonery, I think it is equally naive to expect free market solutions to actually function properly in a non free market setting.

Rising prices as a result of government intervention is not the same as the concept of an increase in demand. It is a form of stealth slavery to those who cannot absorb the increases.

The answer is not more government intervention, but a redress of the original crime being perpetrated in the first place. Until that is resolved, arguing economic principles is a fools game IMO

Sorry, now that I think about it, it doesn't necessarily, if you are just arguing against the violence (which now that I look back on it, you probably were). But for many, economic theory matters because consequences of government intervention is what sways their opinion, rather than government intervention by itself.

If Mike is an ancap, he can say that the answer is to get rid of gov. intervention without knowledge of economic theory, because as he says "government intervention... is a form of stealth slavery to those who cannot absorb the increases."

Because the answer is an answer to an economic question, I figured in order to say the answer is to get rid o gov. intervention, you would have to know economic theory first.

One of the things that I like about the Republican Party and the right in general is their refreshing honesty when compared to the Democrats. The Republicans are a party of War Profiteering, Big Capital and Big Business who don't pretend anything other than what they are. The Democrats, on the other hand, are a party of War Profiteering, Big Capital and Big Business pretending to be a party of Labor and the People. The writers at this page shouldn't stoop to the Dems level and pretend to care about the poor when they really couldn't give a f*&k. Instead of being all "Oh, the poor will have less jobs if we're forced to pay them more and that will hurt the poor and be morally wrong and I really care because I as a libertarian blogger am ultra-concerned about the poor" why don't you just be honest and say "I work for people who want to pay other human beings as little as is humanly possible for their labor"? Then you can at least have the dignity that accompanies honesty, just like the dignity that Boehner had when he was literally handing out checks from tobacco companies on the floor of Congress.

Uh, I think you might be unjustly confusing this blog for having a Republican bias. Its a libertarian blog with an economic bias. Most Libertarians I know are anti-war and believe in very limited government. I think the arguments that resonate here are at the margins of how limited government should be.

I don't read things that 'Anonymous' 'individuals' post. Instead of reading this claptrap website I suggest you guys actually look at MaxKeiser.com. Unfortunately, his analysis is second to none, and a quick look at his track record will prove it. In a perfect world, wages would rise with money supply. This is fair and just, because the amount that people lose in the devaluation of their currency would be reimbursed to them via a proportional rise in wages. This IS the fairest way, although the sitting government would have first use of the money before its value is debased by being spent into the economy. Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world (Ha, FAR from it), and thus the point made about it hurting business is valid. However, the root of the problem is not tackled, so this is actually a trivial point under the current system. Max has actually advocated systemic change to tackle the roots of the problems we see in our financial system today. I guess that his suggestion is a 'perfect world' point of view. Max is for the people. I also suggest that the title of this very article is trolling with intent to smear Max Keiser as something he is not. The crazy inference of Max wanting to 'kick the poor while they're down' could not be further from the truth. I would suggest that those who are doing this are either woefully misinformed or are being paid to do so. And i will stick my name on this, because I am not a trolling coward.

Here's a thought. Maybe some people write anonymously because they want their thoughts and ideas to matter more than the face behind them. Maybe they worry about the growing surveillance state and their privacy being infringed upon. Keep acting like your shit doesn't stink though.

Your intentions do not matter. Raising the minimum wage would cause job losses and the elimination of opportunity for low skilled workers. Advocating for raising the minimum wage is advocating for hurting low skilled workers. Max can keep thinking he is noble and can continue to put out substance-less platitudes but until he learns economics, it is for naught.

If Herr Kaiser's "second to none" analysis is reflected in your grossly economically-ignorant comments, I don't think any of us are missing anything.

"In a perfect world, wages would rise with money supply. This is fair and just, because the amount that people lose in the devaluation of their currency would be reimbursed to them via a proportional rise in wages. This IS the fairest way, although the sitting government would have first use of the money before its value is debased by being spent into the economy."

So basically what you're saying is, the same party, the state, that is responsible for the debasement of the monetary unit, via borrowing and monetary expansion, should by the mechanism by which they've already debased the monetary unit, somehow reimburse wage earners for the damage they've caused?

Is this the kind of buffoonery that Kaiser peddles as "analysis second to none?"

In a "perfect world" there would be no manipulation of the money supply nor would the state be involved in money, currency, price controls, rationing, wages, etc. whatsoever. Further, wages would and CAN ONLY rise with economic growth and wealth expansion due to increased productivity.

Tommyrot. I hope the writer recognizes that money printing debases the dollar, and Keiser's point is that there should be a correlative offset in purchasing power for the people at the bottom of the totem pole.

"If the minimum wage is $10 per hr., then anyone whose productivity is worth less to an employer is in deep trouble."

Aren't you missing the point though. Inflation. The minimum wage would be increased to match the increase in the monetary supply and reflect the decreased purchasing power of the dollar, weather that be $10, $9 or whatever. Are you suggesting capping the minimum wage in an inflationary climate here? You seem to be blinded by ideology TBH.